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The Make Elections Great Again Act, introduced by House Republicans in late January 2026 under the leadership of Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), chair of the House Administration Committee, would require states to check if every voter is still eligible at least once a month using federal databases that government inspectors have repeatedly flagged for high error rates.
The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 established detailed rules to stop officials from unfairly removing people from voter rolls. Those protections include: states must notify each person individually and wait through two federal elections before removing them (roughly four years), and strict limits on what evidence states can use to justify removing someone from the rolls.
When new legislation proposes monthly verification cycles using databases that federal agencies have warned contain significant inaccuracies, the two laws contradict each other and cannot both work at the same time.
One framework says: slow down, verify carefully, give people time to respond, and don’t remove anyone until you’re certain. The other says: check everyone monthly and act fast.
The Constitution’s fairness rules apply even if Congress passes a new law. The right to vote gets the strongest legal protection the Constitution offers. Before the government can take away your right to vote, it must provide clear notice, reliable evidence, adequate time to respond, and a meaningful way to challenge errors.
What the NVRA Requires
The National Voter Registration Act’s Section 8 stopped removing voters without good reason.
Here’s what the statute requires when a state wants to remove someone for changing addresses—the most common purge scenario:
First, the state must have reliable evidence suggesting the person moved. The best source is USPS records, which track when people file address changes. Non-voting cannot be the main reason to investigate.
Second, once the state identifies someone as potentially having moved, it must send them an individualized notice by forwardable mail. This detail protects voters because it accounts for mail delivery problems: if the person did move but hasn’t updated their registration, USPS sends it to their new address if they filed a change. The notice must include a postage-prepaid response card and must explain why the person’s registration is in question and how to fix it.
Third, the state must wait. If the voter doesn’t return the confirmation card and doesn’t vote in the next two federal general elections after receiving the notice, only then can the state remove them. A notice sent after one election can’t result in removal until after two more federal elections—four years.
The waiting period protects voters by giving them time to discover they received a notice, correct errors, and vote despite their registration status. If they vote even once, they cannot be removed.
The NVRA also requires states to complete any mass removal programs at least 90 days before a primary or general election for federal office. If you remove hundreds of thousands of voters right before an election, many won’t find out until they try to vote.
A notice must be printed, mailed, delivered (or forwarded), received, read, and responded to. The state must process returned cards and update voter files. If notices come back as undeliverable, additional steps are required. The state cannot assume the person moved; returned mail might indicate a postal error, a missing apartment number, or temporary delivery problems. Even after all that, the state must still wait for two federal election cycles before removing anyone.
States would have to choose: verify monthly but wait years to remove people (making monthly checks pointless), or remove people quickly (which breaks the law).
Constitutional Requirements for Voter Removal
Even if Congress repealed the NVRA entirely, the Constitution would impose its own requirements. The Fourteenth Amendment says the government cannot take away something important without fair procedures. Voting is among the most protected interests.
A 1976 Supreme Court case, Mathews v. Eldridge, established how courts decide what protections are needed: courts weigh the private interest at stake, the government’s interest, and the risk of wrongly taking away someone’s right under the procedures being used.
When courts apply this test to voter purges, they find strong protections are needed. The private interest—your right to vote—is fundamental. Removing someone from voter rolls is worse than restricting voting—they cannot vote at all until they register again, which they might not discover they need to do until Election Day.
The government’s interest in accurate voter rolls is legitimate. But the government must pursue that interest in ways that don’t risk wrongly removing eligible voters.
If the evidence used to identify people for removal is unreliable, the risk of wrongly taking away someone’s right increases. When that risk increases, the Constitution demands stronger protections.
Federal courts have consistently said that fair procedures for removing voters must include: clear individualized notice describing the exact reason for proposed removal; meaningful opportunity to contest the removal before it happens; adequate time for voters to respond and correct errors; and an appeal mechanism if removal turns out to be wrong. You cannot remove someone first and let them challenge it later. You cannot fix the harm of missing an election after it’s over.
Can a procedure that compresses notice, response, processing, and decision-making into monthly cycles satisfy constitutional fairness? Mail takes 3-5 days to arrive. If it needs to be forwarded, add another week. The voter needs time to recognize what the notice is, understand it, and respond. Their response needs to get back through the mail. The state needs to process it. If the notice is returned as undeliverable, the state needs to conduct additional investigation. All within a month? And that assumes the evidence triggering the investigation was reliable in the first place.
Database Accuracy and Voter Removal
The MEGA Act would require states to use specific federal databases for citizenship verification. These systems were not designed for voter verification. They were built for Social Security and immigration, and they have mistakes that make them unreliable for deciding who can vote.
Social Security records are not a citizenship registry. They contain information about people with Social Security numbers, including both citizens and non-citizens with legal status. The database has citizenship information from when people applied for Social Security—sometimes decades ago—and it doesn’t automatically update when people become citizens.
States face a choice: process matches quickly without checking them (risking wrongly removing people), or do careful verification (which makes monthly purges impossible).
Courts have said states must use accurate information before removing someone from voter rolls. When evidence comes from computer systems with mistakes, courts require states to prove the system is accurate enough. The MEGA Act requires using databases that make mistakes, without requiring the extra checks that would catch those mistakes.
When millions of voter records are matched against federal databases, small differences create wrong matches. Someone with a common name might match multiple records. Someone who changed their name might not match their own record. Voters have to find and fix these errors themselves by going through complicated government procedures to prove they’re eligible.
Database errors happen more often to certain groups: naturalized citizens, people with common names, and voters of color—especially when computer systems are built with biased information.
Notice Requirements and Practical Implementation
When a state sends address confirmation notices to hundreds of thousands of voters, many come back undelivered. That doesn’t mean voters moved. The notice might have been returned for temporary problems—a missing apartment number, unclear directions, weather, or mail carrier mistakes. Not everyone who moves tells the post office about it.
Under the NVRA, when a notice doesn’t get delivered, the state cannot remove the voter. Additional steps are required: more research to find the voter, follow-up notices, or marking the voter’s record for later checking. The NVRA’s requirement for forwardable mail protects voters because it handles the reality that mail gets lost. If a voter moved but hasn’t updated their registration, USPS may forward the notice to their new address. The voter can respond confirming their new address, allowing their registration to be updated rather than removed.
If the notice cannot be forwarded and comes back, the state must slow down—it cannot immediately remove the voter.
A notice sent at the start of month one has to be mailed, delivered, possibly forwarded, and received. The voter must fill out the confirmation card and mail it back—which takes several more days. The state must read the returned card and update its voter records. If the notice doesn’t get delivered, more steps are required. If the voter responds and confirms they still live there, the state has to update its records. If the voter doesn’t respond, the state must wait to see if they vote in the next federal elections before removing them.
All of this in 30 days is impossible.
How Other Democracies Maintain Accurate Rolls
Germany keeps records current continuously instead of removing voters periodically. German law requires residents to tell local government when they move—not for voting, but because it affects access to schools, utilities, and other services. Local government automatically updates voter records based on this information. German voter rolls stay accurate all the time, so they don’t need to do big purges.
Australia uses computers but with careful protections. The Australian Electoral Commission keeps federal voter lists current and works with state and local agencies to keep them accurate. The AEC collects information from driver’s license, tax, vital records, and education agencies to find voters who’ve moved or died. When the AEC finds someone who might not be eligible, it sends them a notice and gives them time to respond. One federal agency runs the process instead of thousands of local offices with different resources and skills.
Canada has one federal agency that shares information and regularly talks to voters. Elections Canada keeps voter rolls updated using information from 40 government agencies. Elections Canada sends every voter a card three weeks before elections showing their address and registration details. This lets voters check their information and fix any mistakes before voting. Elections Canada finds eligible people who aren’t registered by sharing information with other agencies and running registration programs for specific groups.
These examples share common features: (1) keeping records current all the time instead of doing big purges, (2) telling voters about problems before they vote, (3) giving voters multiple chances to check and fix their information, and (4) having one agency in charge instead of thousands of local offices.
Likely Legal Challenges to MEGA
If MEGA becomes law, expect immediate court challenges. Based on how courts have ruled on fairness, voting rights, and past purge cases, courts would likely find multiple legal problems.
First, courts would probably find that the 30-day requirement conflicts with the NVRA’s fairness rules. If Congress means MEGA to replace the NVRA’s notice and waiting period rules, courts would have to choose which law applies. Courts assume Congress wants to keep existing protections unless it clearly says otherwise. MEGA doesn’t clearly say it’s replacing the NVRA, so it’s unclear which law applies. Courts might find that both laws cannot work at the same time, making MEGA’s removal rules unenforceable.
Second, courts would examine whether removing voters based on database matches—especially databases that make mistakes—violates fairness rules. Your interest (keeping the right to vote) is fundamental. The government’s interest in removing truly ineligible voters is legitimate, but it doesn’t justify the risk of wrongly removing people because databases make mistakes.
Third, courts would examine whether giving voters enough warning and time to respond within 30-day cycles meets the Constitution’s fairness rules. Given how long mail takes and how long processing takes, courts would likely find that 30-day cycles don’t give voters enough warning and time to respond. Courts have said government must give people reasonable time to respond before removing them.
Fourth, lower courts would likely find that rules allowing removal based on inactivity break the law against removing voters for not voting. A federal appeals court has said this rule applies and courts can enforce it.
Fifth, if MEGA’s rules result in removing eligible voters—especially if removals happen more often to voters of color—courts would likely stop the removals based on laws against discrimination. Allowing removal based on databases that make mistakes would likely harm voters of color and other protected groups more.
Based on past cases, courts might: stop the removals, restore wrongly removed voters, require better notices, or create other fair solutions. If the two laws cannot both work, courts might say MEGA’s removal rules violate the Constitution or cannot be used. Individual voters wrongly removed could sue for money damages. The Justice Department could sue to enforce voting rights laws.
Real-World Impact of Inadequate Protections
The documented history of voter purges in the United States shows what happens when fairness protections are absent or inadequate.
In 2015, Georgia removed over 40,000 voters because the state used not voting as a reason to remove them. Hundreds of thousands more were removed in the years after. Many were eligible voters who showed up to vote and found they’d been removed, able only to cast provisional ballots that might not count.
These wrongful removals happened more often in some neighborhoods. They happened more often in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods—places where people move more often, where people have less information about voting, and where it’s harder to vote in every election. In documented cases, voters were removed because of database mistakes—matching to people with similar names, to people who died, or to old records. Some voters found out they were removed only on Election Day, when there was no time to fix it or re-register.
Without fairness protections—individual notices, chances to respond, waiting periods, ways to appeal—nobody fixed these errors.
Courts required fairness protections in the NVRA to prevent this. The law requires: individual notices sent through mail that gets forwarded, waiting periods before removal, a rule against removing voters for not voting, and a requirement to finish removals 90 days before elections. All of these come from past experience showing what happens without protections. The MEGA Act’s 30-day requirement and use of unreliable databases would make it impossible to maintain these protections and would recreate the problems the NVRA was designed to fix.
The stakes concern the most basic question of democracy: who gets to vote and how do we protect that right. The Constitution’s framers debated whether voting was a basic right or something government could restrict. Later constitutional amendments resolved that debate by protecting voting rights—the government cannot take away the right to vote without good reason. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 turned that principle into law by creating rules to prevent government from taking away voting rights without good reason.
Whether MEGA becomes law, and how courts rule, will determine whether those protections continue to limit what government can do to voter rolls, or whether government gets free rein. For millions of Americans who need to stay registered to vote, and for election officials who have to follow whatever law Congress passes, understanding what fairness rules require matters for understanding what could be lost.
The Constitution doesn’t require perfect voter rolls. It requires fair procedures before government removes someone. That distinction—between wanting accurate rolls and requiring fair procedures—is what three decades of federal law and court rulings have tried to protect. The MEGA Act would erase that distinction, prioritizing speed and computers over fair procedures.
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